To be in solitude, together

The hermits show us the easily missed connection between personal spiritualities and the political economies they lean toward

Part 11 of our Ulterior Lives series: A Slow Research Project into The Outsider Politics of Monasticism. Read the introduction here.

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East of the cities and settlements, in the Egyptian desert, lay the region of Cellia, named after the spare and scattered hermetic cells. Built thus with a considered distance between each one, they evoked something of the tender and intentional relationship the hermits kept between the individual and the group, the one and the all.

They say that cities are where people go to be lonely together. Cellia was a subtle transfiguration of the formula: it was where people went to be in solitude together. This dialectic between solitude and commonality gives us the two words by which these ulterior lives have been known. The term “monasticism” points, obviously enough, to the singular, the monos: the solitary nature of the hermetic quest. A monk was a person devoted to solitude; an intensely individual one before God. The much neglected term “cenobite,” on the other hand, comes from two Greek words: koinē, meaning “common,” and bios, meaning “life,” in the social, political, cultural or economic sense. It described a life lived together.

All forms of human life are held in some relationship between the individual and the collective, but the nature of that relationship varies everywhere. Whatever shape it takes may easily be taken for granted, as ‘just the way things are’. It’s usually an inherited situation, hidden in plain sight. The hermits, however, were deeply conscious of this relationship between the one and the all. For them it was a matter of the greatest care and intentionality. In their small and unspectacular way, they kept the dial high at both ends. The solitude was severe. The commonality was rooted in a degree of trust and mutuality that is difficult to find amid the relational impoverishments of progress. They had their own idiosyncratic arrangement between these poles, knowing what belonged to the one, and what was the business of the all.

We might observe their strangeness through the lens of wealth and prosperity. As we know, the hermits aspired toward living with as little as possible. They lived in a mutual contest of prayerful austerity. On the other hand, when it came to any occasion for gathering, for hospitality, or for any neighbourly exchange between themselves or toward some passing traveller, the picture is one of lavish gratuity. They might starve themselves, but they would do their best to feed one another. And, as mentioned previously, it was the done thing to gratefully accept bread, wine, cakes, even if it meant failing at some religious vow. The restraints came off for the gathered occasion.

This political economy is sketched in the tale of the monk who somehow finds himself in possession of a huge cluster of grapes. He chooses not to eat any, but passes the grapes on to a neighbouring hermit who gratefully receives them. However, once the giver has wandered off, this hermit goes and takes the grapes to another neighbour without having eaten a single one. In the end the grapes get passed around the whole vicinity until finally a hermit unknowingly gifts them, untouched, back to the monk who first had them.

In this tale, wealth and resources are refused by the individual and invested wherever possible back into the collective web of relationships. Even in the absurd eventuality that no one eats the grapes, the weave of social trust and mutual aid is fed to bursting. This inverts and confounds the laissez-faire capitalist imagination, where the individual is charged with amassing wealth and prosperity and where any scaffolding of mutual aid would be considered a mark of economic failure. The prevailing economic imagination moves toward the eradication of relationships. Meanwhile, the hermits had no interest in the state as the engine of care alongside rapacious economics. Theirs was not an officiated or regulated system. It was a return to village economics: improvised amid relationships of trust and goodwill.

In the hermetic arrangement, the individual embraces a mantle of poverty, and enjoys, thereby, a rich common life. The monos lives simply and the koinē gratuitously. And yet, the simplicity of solitary one is not some necessary evil that is tolerated in service of a greater common good. It is, in fact, a source of joy, obsession, ecstasy. They all seem far more interested in the poverty of their solitude than in their common abundance. While they feed one another, they often seem quietly confounded at having their own simplicity ruined by another's neighbourly generosity.

In spite of its diametric opposition to capitalist relations between the one and the all, this sort of economic arrangement is not so unimaginable. There are communities who live with not dissimilar leanings, even hidden in neglected corners of developed Western societies, though they are often looked upon as backward and deprived by the lonely measures of progress.

Another view into the hermetic relationship between the one and the all might be found by thinking about law, policing and security. Theoretically, the purpose of security in any modern state is to preserve as much individual freedom as possible. But the hermits had no concerns about leaving behind the pax romana, watched over by Caesar's sword of justice.

There is a humorous tale in which Macarius returns to his cell only to find a thief there, loading his belongings onto a donkey. Macarius pretends to be a passerby (there is the kindly deceit, once again). He helps the thief, loading up his own belongings onto the beast's back, and then he sends him on his way. “We brought nothing into this world,” he says to himself. “Blessed be the Lord in all things.”

They didn't seem to miss the watchful eye of the state, because they were too busy keeping a watchful eye on themselves. If there was any such thing as policing, it was something that the individual exercised over their own heart, as a pursuit of prayerful growth. It was never the province of the collective to exercise or to live under any such thing. And indeed, they didn't have much to steal. This is, naturally, a reversal of the common arrangements of civilisation, where social policing and state power and private property are high, while individual responsibility is kept to the minimum: to avoiding capture or notice.

For the hermits, self-mastery was a constant preoccupation and a cornerstone of desert spirituality. Social policing, however, was almost non-existent. They cultivated a shared value of non-judgment, preferring to pass quietly by anyone else's wrongdoing, from minor foibles to murder. This was a leaning that enabled them to escape civilisation's dependence on the violence of law and forms of social control.

To examine these well-known patterns in the light of social relationships between the individual and collective is to make a connection that is so easily missed between personal spirituality and political economies. These peculiar forms of religious devotion are commonly patronised, pathologised, and infantilised as quaint excesses of religious fancy and individualistic devotion. This is quite false. The personal simplicity of the hermits and the severity of their moral discipline was the backbone of a political economy: a common life that was ecologically harmonious, socially peaceable, and materially coherent. But it was of course a form of life with no need whatsoever of law, fiscal sorcery, standing armies, walled fortresses and borders, or any other province of Caesar's domain. I suspect it is for this reason that these distant images are so commonly reinterpreted as a sort of benign religious madness.

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